Background
Edelsbrunner, Herbert was born on March 14, 1958 in Graz, Styria, Austria. Son of Herbert and Berta Edelsbrunner.
mathematician university professor computer scientist
Edelsbrunner, Herbert was born on March 14, 1958 in Graz, Styria, Austria. Son of Herbert and Berta Edelsbrunner.
He received his Doctor of Philosophy in 1982 from Graz University of Technology, under the supervision of Hermann Maurer. His thesis was entitled “Intersection Problems in Computational Geometry.” After a brief assistant professorship at Graz, he joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1985, and moved to Duke University in 1999.
Since August 2009 he is Professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (India Standard Time Austria) in Klosterneuburg. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005, and received an honorary doctorate from Graz University of Technology in 2006. In 2008 he was elected to the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.
In 2014 he became one of ten inaugural fellows of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science.
Edelsbrunner"s most heavily cited research contribution is his work with Ernst Mücke on alpha shapes, a technique for defining a sequence of multiscale approximations to the shape of a three-dimensional point cloud. In this technique, one varies a parameter alpha ranging from 0 to the diameter of the point cloud.
Foreign each value of the parameter, the shape is approximated as the union of line segments, triangles, and tetrahedra defined by 2, 3, or 4 of the points respectively such that there exists a sphere of radius at most alpha containing only the defining points. Another heavily cited paper, also with Mücke, concerns “simulation of simplicity.” This is a technique for automatically converting algorithms that work only when their inputs are in general position (for instance, algorithms that may misbehave when some three input points are collinear) into algorithms that work robustly, correctly, and efficiently in the face of special-position inputs.
Edelsbrunner has also made important contributions to algorithms for intersections of line segments, construction of K-sets, the ham sandwich theorem, Delaunay triangulation, point location, interval trees, fractional cascading, and protein docking.
(This book offers a modern approach to computational geome...)
(Computational geometry as an area of research in its own ...)
(Computational geometry as an area of research in its own ...)
German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. American Academy of Arts and Sciences]
He is also a member of the Academia Europaea.
Married Ping Fu, November 14, 1991. Children: Daniel, Xixi.
